Unapologetic Optimist

The Canadian seal hunt began this week under new Canadian legislation, promising more humane treatment of the seals being hunted. The legislation requires that the sealers shoot or batter into unconsciousness each baby seal, then slice open their flippers to bleed them out before skinning them. Pressure from the public and from the EU, who is considering banning seal fur, prompted this legislation.

According to witnesses, the regulations are being ignored by sealers, who are not supervised by the Canadian government (who wants to watch baby seals being killed?), which means that the seals are still being skinned alive.

Sealers are not paid well and they are paid by the pelt, so it makes sense that they would not find the time to make sure that a seal is unconscious and then dead before skinning them. They have to skin fast in order to make enough money to support themselves and their families. Sealers are incredibly aggressive and sometimes violent towards observers, who are either members of the media or anti-seal hunt activists, making observation and regulation difficult.

Well, not everyone. Just physicists. The past six weeks have seen several breakthroughs in superconductor research–four new materials have been found to be high temperature superconductors. Before late February, when these breakthroughs began, the only known high temperature superconductors were a variation of copper oxide.

If you don’t know what a superconductor is, read the article!

Sometime last night or in the coming nights, along the archipelago that makes up the Republic of Palau, millions of coral colonies will release billions and billions of sperm and egg cells, mating en masse. The sex cells rise to the surface in the form of orange and pink packets and then burst open, creating oily slicks that can be meters long. Sometimes the spawn coalesces into a slick that can be viewed from space.

In an effort to help the reef rebuild, scientists allow coral that they have cut from the reef to spawn in a protected area and then release the mature larvae into areas where they are likely to settle and grow.

From the UK Telegraph:

More than 2000 years ago, Pythagoras discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios. And the idea of the so-called musica universalis or “music of the spheres” emerged in the Middle Ages which said that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies - the sun, moon and planets - could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors - Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University, and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University - have devised a new way of analysing and categorising music to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence, suggesting that mathematics is a more fundamental language of nature than music.

Following a pioneering effort by Prof Tymoczko in 2006, the trio has now outlined a method called “geometrical music theory” in the journal Science that they say can turn music into shapes.

Like this one! (”The two note chords form a Mobius strip, whose boundary is a ‘trefoil knot’”)

This has got to be one of my favorite Top Anything Lists. Just mix history with animals and hilarity and you get this blog post by Cracked.com, appropriately titled Six Formerly Kickass (read Metal) Creatures Ruined by Evolution.

The Norway Spruce trees in Sweden (what?!) are 8,000 years old, meaning they were the first trees to spring up after the ice age. This makes these trees 3,000 years the senior of California’s Methuselah tree.

 I love to get out of bed early in the morning. I feel more productive, and I have more of the day ahead of me to accomplish my projects. The problem is that sometimes I can’t drag myself out of bed until after 10 AM, and I feel so sluggish that I don’t actually get anything started for a couple of hours.

Well, not anymore! This is a great post from DumbLittleMan.com. The article is geared toward folks who want to wake up before the sun rises, but its 7 tips are less specific, really just giving good advice for healthy sleep (like when to eat, drink, and exercise) and happier, more productive living.

I’m going to do all of these things and I’ll keep you guys posted on how well the tips work. Yay!

This nicely compliments my post “Synchronize Your Body’s Clock!”

Scientists have created material one atom thick, called graphene, by peeling off a layer of the lead of a graphite pencil. This material can be used to study the workings of the universe without the need for expensive equipment, like the particle accelerator outside of Geneva, CERN. Professor Andre Geim , who discovered the material, has just discovered the fine structure constant, which shows the interaction between very fast moving electrical charges in the material and light.

“Change this fine tuned number by only a few percent and the life [on earth] would not be here because nuclear reactions in which carbon is generated from lighter elements in burning stars would be forbidden,” says Prof Geim. “No carbon means no life.”

Opaque amber has always presented paleontologists with a challenge. Fossils trapped inside are not visible to the naked eye–as ScienceDaily.com says, it is like trying to find, in complete blindness, something that may or may not be there. But scientists in France, using an x ray synchrotron technique, have found 356 animal fossils in 100 million year old amber.

Yeah, you heard me. Tigers in India, living in dense jungle and being widely dispersed, are incredibly hard to film. Because tigers are used to the presence of elephants, scientists trained elephants to carry cameras with them, giving the BBC incredibly close looks at the lives of tigers. The filming is part of a BBC series narrated by naturalist dreamboat Sir David Attenborough, called Tiger - Spy in the Jungle.